The trouble with midterm elections is that they tend to have low turnout. That's one of the biggest problems with our electoral system that doesn't have an easy solution - people don't go out and vote and instead do things like protest which isn't really viable in a 2 party system. When people vote, we get bad candidates and it seems as if Republicans are favored here due to their uniformity and pandering.

I assume the pardons for Michael Markus and Little Feather will be coming out today. Just like the Hammonds, they were convicted of arson in connection with protests about use of Federal lands. I can't think of any differences between them and the Hammonds that would cause Trump to not pardon them.

I just thought I would mention that the reasons I've seen for the pardon -- that the sentences were overly harsh and that they had served enough time -- would be reasons best suited to commuting their sentences. They were convicted of intentionally burning federal land. The government's case indicated that the fires were set to cover up evidence of their deer poaching. (They were burning deer carcasses.) I have heard nothing official explaining why it was appropriate to pardon them of those offenses.

Although I understand how it happened that they seemed to receive and fully serve shorter sentences and then get hauled in a second time to serve longer sentences, I also understand how that could seem unfair. (I do question how many who think so would even notice or care when it is done to people they more easily recognize as "criminals.") So, although I don't agree with it, I can see why their remaining sentences might be commuted. But pardoning was, IMO, clearly only political.

And Trump (or one of his staff) does know about commuting as an option. He commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson. Interesting read on the two statements. For the Hammonds, the statement was all about the wrongdoing by the government. For Johnson it was all about how she'd bettered herself and paid her debt. While those would be expected differences between a pardon and a commutation, I wonder how much of the former was because "the government" for the Hammonds was during Obama's tenure.

As far as I have heard, the jury was not asked to make special findings. So, the jury acquitted Astarita. The jurors may have thought he didn't fire, he didn't lie, or just that they could not be sure that he had lied. So, many of the statements in that article about what the jury found are not correct.

erwins, thatís poppycock-flavored malarkey. Next youíll be trying to tell me that even though no one was convicted of murdering Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson that they didnít both die of natural causes.